Job grades, job evaluation, and Jobscore

The advantages of job family structures are:

Recognition that career progression patterns may vary between different job families.
Maps out career paths by defining the competencies required at different levels and shows clearly how progression can take place within job families.
Can vary the size of the progression ranges (incremental scales) in different job families.
Enables pay for different job families to reflect differing market rates.

The disadvantages are:

While it can be argued that some occupations are best treated separately because they require very different skill sets, job family structures can be divisive by creating occupational 'silos' and by apparently favouring some roles and occupations.
Job families may further career development within a family but they could inhibit career flexibility (moving between families).
In the absence of a common grade structure, it may be difficult to ensure that equal pay for work of equal value is achieved across job families. To provide for equal pay it is necessary to resort to benchmarking (comparing the job evaluation score and pay of individual jobs), this can be a difficult and cumbersome process. Significantly different market salary levels between job families may also compromise equal pay for work of equal value.
They are more difficult to administer than the simpler structures.

Examples of job family groupings for an academic institution are:

Education, Research and Enterprise: Professors, Senior Lecturers/Lecturers, Readers, Senior & Research Fellows, Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, Research Scientists and Engineers, Research & Academic Consultants, Research-focused Experimental Officers.
Management, Specialist and Administrative: Managerial and administrative, clerical, computing and library staff.
Technical and Experimental: Technicians, Technical-focused Experimental Officers.
Community and Operational: Sports Officers, Day Nursery staff, Halls staff, Security staff, Maintenance staff, Manual staff.

In a manufacturing organisation typically, these are : General Management, Engineering, Research and Development, Production (and Procurement), Marketing (and Distribution), Finance, Administrative Services, Information Systems.

Figure 3. A job family structure:

Use Jobscore to build graded job family structures
and NRC salary surveys for job family salary levels.

Home previous page next page